I'm Dying to Meet You in the Next Life

The Grim Reaper cannot catch a break in Newport Beach, California. In a slide show in the grand ballroom of the Marriott, a picture of the hooded, scythe-wielding one is imprisoned behind that international sign of negation: a circle with a diagonal strike through it. The simplicity of the rendering has turned the Pale Rider into a neutered Milquetoast. He could signify "No trick-or-treaters!" for all the menace he musters. This vanquished monster makes a suitable visual for Rob Freitas's lecture, "Death Is an Outrage!"

"During the time I just spoke this sentence, a dozen people died," he says, sounding duly appalled. He pauses for effect: "...and there's another dozen." The sound of pens scratching on paper fills the room as people transcribe Freitas's words. It's an Escher moment, like the cereal box with the image of the child eating beside the box with the image of the child eating beside the box, and on and on. How many people died, one wonders, in the time it took to write down what he said about how many people died in the time it took him to say it?

Death is the numinous presence that hovers over the fifth Extreme Life Extension Conference. The three-day meeting is sponsored by Alcor, the Arizona cryonics company that has put the body of Boston Red Sox Hall of Famer Ted Williams in cryogenic suspension, in the hope he may one day rise again. Like worshipers at a weekend-long Easter Mass, about 150 scientists and acolytes have gathered to hear the Good News about the latest developments in securing their own resurrections and immortality. Here, death is viewed as little more than a nuisance, a persistent gnat to be batted away. Death is certainly not going to ruin anyone's fun. As chairman Ralph Merkle, a nanotechnologist from Palo Alto, California, said when he kicked things off, "This conference is about, by and for people who think life is a pretty good thing and that more life is better." Even the landscape surrounding the hotel seems imbued with optimism: rolling manicured lawns, palm trees and flower beds planted with murderously orange canna lilies, sloping gently down to the emerald golf links of Orange County.

Freitas continues: "This holocaust we call natural death produces 2.4 million deaths annually in the United States alone. The human death toll in 2001 was nearly 55 million people. The worst disasters in human history pale in comparison to natural death." Freitas goes on to liken the richness of each person—his knowledge as opposed to, say, the street value of his hair and gold fillings—to the equivalent of at least one book. That's a "destruction" equivalent to three Libraries of Congress per year. Further, if you agree that some people are more than one book, then it's even more devastating. If, however, you feel that some folks' book is The Prince of Tides, or that others of us add up to all the complexity of a document, frequently pink, titled "While You Were Out," then it's a tragedy of lesser magnitude.

Like many here, Freitas is a nanotechnologist. Nanotechnology is the Holy Grail of what's to come for cryonics—the thing that will make bringing patients out of cryosuspension possible. He talks about a future in which an array of intelligent nanodevices will be dispatched into our bodies like so many Fantastic Voyage Raquel Welches, their sole mission our intracorporeal perfection. Many of the methods he cites are theoretically feasible: chromosome-replacement therapy (microscopic cell-by-cell damage repair); respirocytes (artificial red blood cells that would enable us to sink to the bottom of a pool and hold our breath for four hours); microbivores (artificial white blood cells that would be one hundred times more effective than the real thing). All of these, says Freitas, could potentially restore us to the perfection of our youth.

"A rollback to the physiology of your late teens might be easier than your 10-year-old self," he says, "and more fun. We could live about 900 years." A terrifying prospect, since everyone else would also be 18 again, and that ruthless food chain of those miserable years would reign once more. Only this time, high school would be nine centuries long. That's close to a millennium's worth of blackheads.

The grand fantasy of cheating death, the underlying myth at the heart of this conference, is as old as humanity itself. Most every culture has a cautionary tale about some soul who aspires to godlike immortality and is brought low as a result. Not surprisingly, the disastrous hubris of Icarus is not invoked here. What is brought up repeatedly as a worthy precedent is a letter Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1773: "I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira wine, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country!"

The intervening twenty-three decades since Franklin's missive have done little to make that dream practical. What becomes clear over the course of the conference is that even these eminent scientists don't have much of a plan. Perhaps that's why I never see anyone else in the hotel gym. You would think I would be jogging beside my fellow health-crazed attendees. You would be wrong. I am the only one in the fitness center doing this particular tap dance along the mortal coil. Instead of breathless conversation, my soundtrack is the whir of my solitary treadmill—and the Fox News Channel on the television placed too high up for me to change. I have heard the future and it sounds like Hannity Colmes. It also might explain why the conferees don't seem overly concerned with diet and nutrition. Lunch one day is mashed potatoes, beef in gravy, chicken in cream sauce, and white-flour rolls, and on the next, a life-extending Mexican buffet, all eaten with great alacrity. I have tasted the future and it is gooey with melted Jack cheese. I am reminded of that moment in Sleeper when one of the scientists of 2173 is amazed to hear that Woody Allen, a health-food-store owner revived out of cryosuspension after 200 years, knows nothing of the salubrious properties of hot fudge.

Putting aside for a moment the overweening narcissism of wanting to live forever or the sheer implausibility of "reanimation" ever working, what defies my comprehension is why anyone would seek this out. I just cannot get past thoughts of the crushing loneliness of waking up years hence in a world without my loved ones. Gregory Benford, a physicist and science-fiction writer, suggests having one's "context"—friends and family—frozen alongside one, although he argues that the future would be no worse than a new infancy: "When we're born, we don't know anybody. Others know us, though. It's like being a star."

I learn a great many things over the three days—about molecular engineering, tissue preservation and protocols in the rapid cooling of bodies—but I am left largely in the dark as to a fleshed-out, practical vision of a post-reanimation future. On what kind of money and resources will reanimated Alcorians live? There is talk of negotiations in progress with "an international law firm and financial institution" to set up a trust that would provide funds on the other side. But it seems to me that currencies barely exist now. If someone had taken similar steps in Europe just a few years ago, he would find himself out of luck, having slept through the amnesty for old deutsche marks.

It's neither terribly expensive nor terribly complicated to sign up for cryosuspension. It costs $50,000 to preserve just your head. That would make you a "neuro." It's $120,000 for your whole body.

Some conferees display a naïveté straight out of a child's dream. A brief malfunction of the PowerPoint allows an elfin man named Peter Toma to stand up at the microphone. Toma, a sixtyish linguist and a pioneer in the field of automatic translation programs, was disconsolate when his mother was dying, believing "there must be a continuation of life." He tried to find some place to store her body, looking in New Zealand and Argentina, to no avail. She is now safely at Alcor. And today Toma bears great tidings. He has found a country where one can go into "vistasis"—that is, be frozen while still alive, although the process itself will kill you (Alcor's official position on this brand of euthanasia is one of supportive nonendorsement). This magical place? Switzerland. I am shocked, shocked, to hear that the Swiss—whose famous neutrality has made them a shining beacon unto the world for haven seekers, clock enthusiasts and Nazi bankers—will, according to Toma, look the other way if one is euthanized within their borders. And Switzerland has certain geographic advantages, should some unforeseen global disaster arise: "We can be taken into the mountains." I can already hear the strains of Grieg and the plinking of icicle chandeliers. "So!" Toma concludes his Alpine fairy tale. "Switzerland!"

···

The area around alcor headquarters, in Scottsdale, Arizona, is dominated by two-story strip malls in tandoori-color plaster. The median of Frank Lloyd Wright Boulevard is planted with saguaros, but the master architect's aesthetic doesn't seem much in evidence. It's hard to distinguish the Taco Bell from the stone-and-marble suppliers from the cryonics labs out here in this vast Frederic Remington landscape. Alcor itself is almost defiantly unprepossessing, set back from the road by a small parking area and a gravel desert garden. It could be a suburban dental practice.

Established in 1972, Alcor has fifty-seven "patients" in cryosuspension and some 600 living members signed up, with men outnumbering women about three and a half to one. Though the company won't confirm or deny it, this is where the late Ted Williams lives. The disposition of Williams's physical remains was the cause of much legal wrangling among his surviving children, two of whom—John Henry and Claudia—wish to join their father in cold storage when they die. (Repeated calls to John Henry were not returned.) The dispute over their father was eventually settled in December, making the Splendid Splinter our most famous frozen American. (That apocryphal tale of Mr. Disney's being preserved in a secret laboratory somewhere underneath Main Street, U.S.A., is a myth, I'm afraid. Uncle Walt was summarily cremated after his death, in 1966.)

A glass door opens onto the modest reception area, outfitted with two cream leather armchairs and a round glass table. On the table sits an Emmy award, part of the bequest of Dick Jones, a writer for The Carol Burnett Show. A statuette is not a sculpture. It looks misplaced, as if the owner might come back at any moment to reclaim it. Perhaps he will. Jones is one of the twenty-odd Alcor patients who have opted to have their pictures displayed in the foyer; a small brass plate bears his name as well as the dates of his "first life cycle." Other photographs include an older couple in their 1940s Sunday best and a young man, dead at 29 from hemophilia-derived AIDS. There is very little fanfare to this gallery. They could all be Employees of the Month.

It's neither terribly difficult nor terribly expensive to sign up for cryonic suspension. A lot of paperwork must be filled out, much of it in triplicate and much needing to be notarized. Bodies are bequeathed to Alcor under the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, the same statute that allows you donate your organs to the sick or bequeath your cadaver so first-year anatomy students can cut you up and, if my cousin's medical-school experience is any indication, make fun of the size of your penis. Suspensions are paid for by insurance policies taken out with Alcor as the beneficiary. It costs $50,000 for a neuropreservation—"neuro" for short—which is just your head, and $120,000 for your whole body. Membership in Alcor also comes with a one-cubic-foot box for memorabilia, which is placed one mile underground in a salt mine in Hutchinson, Kansas. Patients receive a MedicAlert-type bracelet as well as a dog tag and a wallet card, all with the express written admonition that no autopsy be performed in the event of their death. If any cutting is going to be done, that's Alcor's job. And if you're a neuro, there is some major cutting to be done, namely decapitation, euphemistically referred to as "cephalic isolation."

Alcor's primary competitor, with forty-six patients in suspension, is the Cryonics Institute, outside Detroit. Suspension at CI costs $28,000, considerably less than at Alcor, and CI emphatically does not offer the head-only option. As CI says on its Web site, "Few things have served to caricature and discredit cryonics so thoroughly as neurosuspension." Alcor counters that CI is not as scientifically advanced.

These rivals are squabbling over an anticipatory dream, like the old joke about the family that gets into a pitched battle about the car that hasn't been bought yet. "This is the realm of science fiction," says a scientist in the National Nanotechnology Initiative at the National Science Foundation, who will not allow himself to be named. "We have about 30,000 to 40,000 people working in nanotechnology. None works on cryogenics." Most conventional scientists liken reanimation to reconstituting a cow from a package of ground beef. The extraordinary advancement that will have to take place before any of it is remotely possible is multipartite: There has to be a cure for the disease that killed you; the aging process has to be arrested and reversed; cellular damage from the extremely toxic preservatives, or cryoprotectants, must be reparable, as must the inevitable injuries from freezing; and in the case of neuros, there's the small added matter of somehow growing a new body to house your brain, possibly through the promising regenerative capabilities of therapeutic human cloning (that's stem cells, not Raelians). It's as if anesthesia were discovered centuries before the advent of surgery. For now, cryonics remains a science of antecedence.

I am walked through Alcor's facility by Hugh Hixon, senior board member and facilities engineer. Hixon is the longest-serving Alcor employee, having started there in 1982. He has participated in more than fifty suspensions. White-haired, bespectacled and dressed in snug khaki shirt and trousers, he looks like a docent in the reptile house. He speaks somewhat slowly, with a flattened affect. When I ask him if it feels strange to work day in and day out in such close proximity to dead bodies, he replies that it does not bother him much. His concentration is on the smooth technical operation. "It helps that I'm a notably unemotional person." He concedes, "If I had a family, that might not be an advantage." Hixon's sangfroid is no posture, because he does have a family. Right here, in fact. One of the photographs on the wall—and therefore one of the patients on these very premises—is his own father.

Hixon leads me through the cryonics process. Once your body has been safely transported to Alcor, it is perfused with antifreeze-like cryoprotectants, and you are cooled to -230 degrees Fahrenheit. In preparation for your long-term suspension, your temperature is gradually brought farther down, to that of liquid nitrogen, -320 degrees (chilled too quickly, you'd shatter like an NBA backboard). Finally, you are moved into one of Alcor's dewars, the reinforced stainless-steel tanks named after Sir James Dewar of the scotch-producing dynasty. There you will wait out the years until the glorious flowering of science brings you back.

Hixon takes me to the patient-care bay, where the dewars are. It is a garagelike room with five dewars against the wall. Standing near them, I have a hard time even remembering that there are human bodies, and parts thereof, in these tanks. There is no sinister hiss of liquid nitrogen. It's not even particularly cold, with none of that ozone smell of frigidity, like in a hockey arena. If there is an overriding aroma to the place, it is coming from the small employee kitchen. I have smelled the future and it is redolent of microwave popcorn.

A dewar, I learn, can hold up to four bodies and five heads. The full-body patients are stored upside down, so that, in the unforeseen event of a nitrogen boil-off, the head would be the last to thaw. Neuros are stacked five high in the central column of the dewar. Each head is placed in what looks like a high, narrow steel stockpot. There is an empty one on a shelf. It looks like a superior piece of cookware, and I covet it immediately. I also learn that a few suspended beloved cats and dogs are scattered here and there throughout the dewars, wherever there's a bit of room. In the interest of space, pets are always neuros.

I ask Hixon whether any concessions are made to preserve the neuros' faces. Not really. Neuropreservation is all about the brain. The only reason it is kept in the skull is to minimize damage. Hair is removed to reduce insulation and to allow easy access to the burr holes made in the skull for the "crackphones"—seismograph-like sensors that monitor any fissures that may result from freezing. Also, the antifreeze renders the skin translucent. "This is not a cosmetic procedure" is all Hixon will say on the record.

My ghoulish line of questioning is less an attempt to get a rise out of Hixon than to make myself feel something, like a child telling himself ghost stories. It doesn't work. The whole place seems quite banal, which isn't that surprising. Every business, no matter how out there, gets its filing cabinets, faux-woodgrain desks and half-wall partitions from the same few suppliers. It's not like I had been expecting the dark, heavy draperies of an Aleister Crowley decadence—ravens and wall sconces—but a little of the chilly steeliness of Gattaca might have been nice.

By the time you read this, efforts will have been made to convey precisely that to visitors. The patient-care bay is currently being redecorated by a Hollywood set designer. The barnlike door that leads to the cool-down room will soon have a more metallic look, like an industrial freezer. The walls will be a two-tone affair of wainscot-high aubergine topped by an elegant gray, and the dewars will sport a gleaming mirror-bright surface. Hixon couldn't care less about these cosmetic changes, but he takes them in stride: "People seem to get turned on by the polished finish."

I ask the employee to show me the decapitator, otherwise known as the cephalic isolator. He sighs, then shows me an ordinary handsaw in blue surgical paper marked "amputation saw."

As I make my way to the stark white operating theater, I stumble upon a room with a large machine that bears a big saw-toothed wheel, the teeth pointing up and down in a fairly ragged and aggressive display of tear-apart force. Is this the decapitator, I wonder? No. It's a huge mir, a kind of gargantuan Hamilton Beach they use to blend the cryoprotectant. When I ask Hixon to show me the cephalic isolator, he smiles and sighs gently, used to the media's fixation on the "yuck factor." He takes me into a supply room, opens a cabinet and takes out an ordinary handsaw wrapped in blue surgical paper and labeled with a handwritten note: AMPUTATION SAW. It all comes down to this, after all. The back-and-forth motion of a preindustrial tool, powered by that most primitive of devices: the human arm.

A man of 53, Jerry Lemler, the president and CEO of Alcor, is bearded and balding, with traces of a Freud-like demeanor, possibly a remnant of his career as a psychiatrist, which he was until recently in Knoxville, Tennessee. His wife, daughter and son-in-law all work at Alcor, and they are all signed up as neuros. Lemler is an easy man to talk to and takes my skepticism in stride. He describes himself as extremely liberal, which he admits is something of a political anomaly in the cryonics community. I have been told anecdotally that about 70 percent of Alcorians are libertarian. That makes sense, given that libertarianism is the Platonic ideal of uninterrogated politics. What has troubled me since the conference at Newport Beach is what seems to be a widespread belief among the conferees that one's allocation of privilege—in most cases, a lengthy life essentially free of want—is limitless and should continue to be so. (I've also been told anecdotally that as many as 25 percent of the current suspended-patient population might be gay men. Now, there's a Venn diagram to chill me to the core of my homosexual marrow.)

Lemler is patient, friendly and also the first person to posit a fully rounded vision of the future. His vision is not pretty. He believes in the coming of "the Singularity." A term coined by the mathematician Vernor Vinge, the Singularity refers to that point in the future when machines of greater-than-human intelligence will be created, outstripping by far the intellectual capabilities of man. These machines, in turn, would design and create even more intelligent machines, resulting in an at-present unfathomable explosion of technological advancement. Once consigned to the far distant future, the Singularity is now thought to be much closer. Vinge himself would "be surprised if this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030."

And what does that mean for someone like Lemler and the other cryonauts? "Once we tap into the physiologic basis of memory, I think most people will opt to have our memories uploaded onto computer discs, which can have multiple copies sent out to various places in the universe, so that if one is destroyed by a cosmic-pinball explosion somewhere, another instantaneously can come up and would have all the memories of that first person."

Our physical presence would no longer be. The body would cease to exist, which would alleviate the need to learn how to grow new ones for the neuros, I suppose. We would exist in a state of perpetual virtual reality. New experiences would be a function of programs dragged and clicked onto us for our delectation.

This future seems unutterably bleak, like those city-size hives of somnolent hairless bodies in The Matrix—reduced to hard drives cybernetically reminiscing in a world without end. In Lemler's view, my attachment to the corpus as an institution is a sentimental one. "Our bodies are just transitory and rather poorly formed for safety's sake—vehicles for our mind, which is the essence of the person," Lemler tells me.

How are babies born in the future?

"They're not. It's the end of population as we know it today. There won't be any need to do menial work," says Lemler.

Maybe not in the Western world. But Lemler is only talking about events he believes will happen a few decades hence. There are some fairly vast regions of the world where, even now, technology barely extends as far as potable water. What about the majority of adults in the undeveloped world for whom life remains nasty, brutish and short? How is all this supposed to reach them? It's not. By design. At the conference, the Singularity was also referred to as a "technorapture." A rapture, by definition, involves a division of souls in which some are called and some are left behind to perish in the Lake of Fire. Lemler understands what I'm getting at. "We're going to have that whether Alcor is here or not, whether cryonics is here or not. A good portion of the population is going to die off—there's no question about that, much as mankind has done for however many millions of years," he says with a genuine and regretful-sounding kindness in his voice.

Suddenly, Ralph Merkle's words come through loud and clear, spoken when he dedicated the conference to "people who think life is a pretty good thing and that more life is better." Cryonics is the ultimate indulgence for people who think their life is a pretty good thing. When Rob Freitas talked of death as an outrage, he spoke for a generation: "If you're physiologically old and don't want to be, then for you, aging is a disease." It's that prototypical baby-boomer trick of pathologizing those things that stand in the way of one and one's desires, however unrealistic or selfish.

Aging, of course, isn't a disease, though you can't convince the Alcorians. In Newport Beach, one lecturer ran through all the usual counterarguments to extending life indefinitely. Apparently, the Colonel Blimps among us feel that aging is good "because it gives life its meaning." This occasioned much derisive laughter in the room, which mystified me. Aging does give life some of its meaning, if you're lucky. Those changes in our bodies—the masteries that are acquired, the capacities that dissipate—and the people we lose form the basis of wisdom. They provide a sense of consequence and context. I feel pretty comfortable characterizing as sad, for example, that a man as old as Hugh Hefner still seems to aspire to nothing higher than dating 24-year-old twins. Seven and a half decades is an awfully long time not to grow up. The cryonicists are simply one extreme within a cultural moment that has vilified aging to the point where the injection of a neurotoxin to erase wrinkles and halt facial expression is completely acceptable.

The Alcorians will think me a fool, no doubt, and many things in this world are an outrage, to be sure, but death at our current life expectancy doesn't strike me as one of them (and as a gay man who lived in New York City during the 1980s, I know a thing or two about people disappearing before their time). Maybe I sound like some Victorian who felt that forty years ought to be enough for any man, but one of the marks of a life well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind. Given the choice, I'll throw my lot in with the rest of those whose deaths will be irrevocable, the Dustafarians. In my brief glimpse of what is to come, I realize how little I care to witness it. I have seen the future and I'm fairly relieved to say it looks nothing like me.

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